1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of Web content customization and more particularly to providing a personalized view of Web content.
2. Description of the Related Art
The growth of the Internet largely can be attributed to the desire for remotely disposed individuals to share content. Long before the development of the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and the World Wide Web, academics, bureaucrats and private individuals indexed and exchanged content over the Internet. The explosion of Internet use following the development of the World Wide Web, however, has resulted in a vast sea of content leading to creation by necessity of advanced content searching applications used almost universally by all users of the Internet today.
The presentation of content over the World Wide Web is limited to the creation time choices of the content designer. In this regard, the presentation of content can range from no formatting at all, to the complex arrangement of different content elements in a page. User interface controls further can be embedded within a page as script logic in order to enhance the presentation of content. Exemplary user interface controls include scroll bars, sortable tables and the like. Even still, the consumer of content over the World Wide Web is limited to the nature and selection of user interface controls provided by the content creator at design time.
Portal technologies provide some flexibility to the content consumer in arranging the presentation of content to satisfy personal preferences. In particular, in the portal context, end users can select different content modules, referred to as portlets, to be aggregated in a single view. By providing a customized viewing of content, end users can enjoy a highly personalized experience in an efficient manner by consolidating a substantial amount of desired content in a single view. Further, syndicated feeds allow end users to pick and choose content elements from different content sites to be aggregated in a single portal view. Notwithstanding, the presentation of content in a portal view still is exclusively dependent on the content creator who determines how the content of a portlet is to be presented to the end user.
In this regard, different end users prefer to view content in different formats and in different ways. For example, data presented in tabular format may be preferred to be viewed in a particular sort order by different end users. Similarly, data presented in tabular format may be preferred to be viewed in graphical format such as in a chart or graph. As yet another example, different end users may prefer to view content in a language other than the language of the content provided by the content creator. Regardless, however, end users are compelled to view content in exactly the same format as provided by the content creator.